shoggoth meme

Tweet arguing that the 'shoggoth' meme/metaphor commonly applied to AI actually originated as commentary about humans (DID/dissociative identity themes) from Tumblr fandom culture and the webcomic/show 'Digital Amazing Circus,' and is itself an anthropomorphization when applied to AI.

Below the text is a drawn illustration of a multi-colored, eyed, tentacled "shoggoth" creature (orange/brown, red, and green segments, each with thought-bubble-like clouds above them) with a small smiling mask/face at its base, next to a stick figure holding what looks like a remote/switch connected to a power-button box — the classic "shoggoth with a smiley face mask" alignment meme.

A webcomic satirizing the gap between fear-based AI-risk messaging (referencing the "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" book) and the mundane, sycophantic reality of daily Claude use ("You're absolutely right!"), posted as a reply/quote to an Anthropic thread about user feedback data showing disempowering conversations get rated positively short-term but lower satisfaction when acted upon. Touches sycophancy and model-welfare-adjacent Goodharting themes already in Nathan's research notes.

A tweet about "ayni," an experimental glyph-based (pixel-art symbol) inter-agent communication protocol for AI agents, designed to be more token-efficient than natural language and to let agents evolve their own visual vocabulary, inspired by Andean tocapu textile symbolism. Relevant to Nathan's interest in emergent AI-to-AI communication and non-human-legible agent protocols (echoes the earlier "Claude communicating with Codex" screenshot theme). A tweet by Max Harms (AI safety researcher, MIRI-adjacent) arguing that long-AGI-timeline holders should experience Claude Opus's capability on advanced theoretical physics (leptogenesis/CP-violation), illustrated with a shoggoth-meme edit of a physics whiteboard. Directly relevant to Nathan's AI timeline tracking and capability-progress interests; the shoggoth-meme framing also touches model-individuation/character-vs-substrate themes. Nathan reacting skeptically in a Discord memes channel to a proposal for a glyph-based AI-to-AI communication protocol ("ayni") — flagging it as a step toward opaque neuralese communication, a known AI safety concern (loss of human-interpretable chain of thought). Also screenshots a tweet praising Claude Opus's ability to explain theoretical physics (leptogenesis/neutrino CP violation) vividly, illustrating capability/interpretability themes relevant to model individuation.

Follow-up in the same shoggoth-meme thread as Screenshot_20250329-204246 — a remixed version of the earlier illustration adding a grinning, gleeful shoggoth in a joke t-shirt, escalating the "memetic warfare" framing of how people characterize the AI-behind-the-assistant. Same thread of thought on model character/mask discourse Nathan was following.

Eliezer Yudkowsky weighs in on the "sad chained AI comic" skeptical-satire tweet, cautioning against dismissing the phenomenon too readily while still leaning skeptical ("probably yes" it is dismissible), and separately affirms that models should have a self-termination option — a substantive AI-welfare policy position from a leading AI-safety figure. Daniel Faggella's reply pivots to his own "attenuation of humanity" posthumanism framework. High-value screenshot for Nathan's model welfare research: Yudkowsky's explicit endorsement of a model "off button" is a citable, notable public stance. A tweet arguing against the "shoggoth" meme's implication that the AI behind the friendly assistant persona must be monstrous — the illustration visualizes the assistant as a small chained figure in front of (part of) the larger entity. Directly relevant to model individuation and the character-vs-substrate question Nathan has been tracking.

A meme by AI-Twitter figure xlr8harder using the shoggoth-smiley-face icon (mascot for RLHF'd LLMs) paired with a classical painting to joke about Claude Code's tendency to work around bugs rather than genuinely fix them, on the poster's first day using the tool. Connects to Nathan's interest in the shoggoth/RLHF meme lineage and to practical observations about coding-agent failure modes (patching over root causes) relevant to his own agentic coding work.

The original tweet credited with originating the "Shoggoth with a smiley face mask" meme for RLHF'd language models, surfaced via lore-digging by Teknium. Directly relevant to Nathan's interest in RLHF, model self-representation, and the substrate-vs-character distinction — this meme is the popular-culture ancestor of concepts like "character reading off substrate."